Mark Rosenfelder

The death of the small town seems like it was fore-ordained by simple economics. In big cities, you can afford to have businesses like restaurants that aren't Sysco retail outlets, movie theaters that show more than the five most popular films on Earth at the moment, libraries that have books beyond romance novels, bestsellers, and out-of-date nonfiction.

Moreover, cities are the economic drivers, even in the agricultural world:

https://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html

> But don't cities arise from and depend on agriculture? No: all economic progress originates in cities, [Jane] Jacobs tells us; and cheekily adds that all agricultural progress originates in cities. Great advances, such as mechanical reapers and electricity, were invented and adopted in or near cities before being applied to agricultural regions farther out. Productivity improvements in agriculture always begin near the cities and spread out.

> What we think of as purely rural activities often began in the cities. In premodern Europe, the quintessential cottage industry was weaving; but before cloth was woven in cottages the art was rediscovered and practiced in cities. Dark Ages peasants lived on gruel; the art of breadmaking was recovered first in cities (and based on city-grown bread; a medieval city had its own fields). In our own rural areas there are vast ranches where animals are fattened before slaughter; they are transplants from the city stockyards of Kansas City and Chicago.

> Driving the nail in…

Most important piece of the following post? http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html

I'm not an economist, but I've gotten the impression from reading lots of articles like this, that it is net negative overall, as in, world wide. But I have never, ever seen a source claim that it is net negative on a national or local level outside of very, very narrowly defined parameters. I have, however, read academic papers that state the opposite.

Let's use NAFTA as an example as the canonical example. A corporation that makes tires moves to Mexico. As a result, tires for everyone in America are now half price, people who had no jobs in Mexico before now have jobs, which helps build out Mexican infrastructure, 20k people across the US no no longer have jobs; but the US economy is healthy, so those people will hopefully be okay and the US economy will likely not even notice such a slight change in labor demand.

Net result: 320 million people have cheaper tires in the US, Mexicans get better jobs, infrastructure and technology, 20k us lose jobs, the corporation saves money, and hopefully reinvests in something to stay competitive.

Using the above scenario, it is easy to see why any legislation against this behavior is seen as damaging and a net loss.

Lets further assume, that the US passes legislation that trailer hitch manufacturers have to pay an import tarriff from Mexico. Using the above scenario, an economist would say not only are you damaging what should be a net positive…

Wow, great to see this site on there. When I was a teenager the Language Construction Toolkit is what got me into Linguistics and completing a degree in it: https://www.zompist.com/lckbook.html

When I say I have a degree in linguistics inevitably I'm asked "How many languages do you speak?" which is a question that I think most people with linguistic degrees roll their eyes at. Linguistics is very, very different than learning a language and even applied linguistics is just a subcategory of it.

What I typically say is that I'm awful at learning languages. I believe very strongly from both the research that I've seen and anecdotally that someone's aptitude for learning a language has a hell of a lot more to do with someone being an extrovert who likes new experiences and doesn't have anxiety. I am bad at learning languages because I am awkward and asocial. My favorite language to learn was Sanskrit because it felt like "decoding" something versus the social/anxiety producing "production" aspect of languages.

With the skills I do have though, depending on how much work I put into it, I can probably get better at comprehension in reading more quickly than most people because I like the "decoding" aspect.

Yes.

Countries were relevant back in the days when territory was the most prized thing and war was the best means of acquiring it. Countries evolved as a means of ensuring territorial integrity, via means both explicit (borders enforced by militaries) and implicit (cultural/linguistic homogeneity, leading to xenophobia and other such barriers).

But territories are no longer the most prized thing: economies are. And economies are produced by cities, not countries.[1]

Moreover, the rise of the importance of cities is genuinely a challenge to the institutions of countries, not something that is merely happening in parallel to the ongoing importance of countries. This is because the factors which allow cities to thrive -- internal diversity and external trade -- are almost diametrically opposed to the factors which allow countries to maintain their territorial integrity.

Of these two forms of power, I'm betting on cities.

1: http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html

> I know next-to-nothing about Chinese, but it seems to me that if a language can be spoken, it can be represented with a phonetic alphabet.

You might be interested in this:

http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

One interesting thing I learned from it the logographic aspects of written Chinese have influenced spoken Chinese by encouraging short, phonetically-ambiguous abbreviations that tend to replace the original phonetically-distinct words.

> Those sentences which only make sense in traditionally-written, not spoken or phonetically-written Chinese, would obviously be a huge cultural loss.

That's already happened to a degree. The Chinese dropped written Classical Chinese for written Mandarin, which is based on a vernacular. That's akin to the West dropping written Latin in favor of vernacular writing. I understand Classical Chinese needs to be translated to be understood.

Right. It's a tantalizing hypothesis. My gut feeling is that it is likely at least a few of the identified language families (particularly Turkish and Mongolic and Korean) are related. But this simply has never been demonstrated by anyone adequately to make a scientific claim. A hunch at best. There just isn't enough data. There probably will never be.

As soon as you add even slight fuzziness in what constitutes a valid match, given you're dealing with thousands of words in hundreds of forms... and you're matching all of them against each other, the search space explodes and you start finding matches. Dozens. Hundreds even.

A great article by programmer, amateur linguist and imaginary world creator Mark Rosenfelder goes into this in some detail: http://zompist.com/chance.htm "How likely are chance resemblances between languages?" (Quite likely!)